by Melissa Miles McCarter

Created on: November 02, 2009

Feminism, where art thou?

According to a recent study garnering much media attention, women's experience of happiness has declined in the last 35 years compared to men's This study is important because some use its conclusion to argue feminism has failed to make women happier even though they are more equal, have more rights, and more privileges than ever before. So, why are men happier than women and is feminism to blame?

To answer this question for myself, I decided to go to the source of the conundrum, the study itself. First of all, as might be expected, the authors of the study believe "we might expect to see a concurrent shift in happiness toward women and away from men" in the last 35 years."

So I wonder, why we might think women would be happier in the last 35 years. This assumption is based on the belief that the gains made by feminism would lead to happiness. However, antifeminists have been arguing for decades that feminism creates fundamental losses for women, in notions of gender identity, relationships with men, and self-fulfillment. In their eyes, women can't be happy within feminist social changes because they can't fulfill their feminine destiny.

From Phyllis Schlafly to Camille Paglia, feminism has been questioned for its misunderstanding of the true needs of women. In this perspective, women and men are essentially different, and if women behave as men, ignoring their cultural or biological nature, they are bound to be unhappy. To an antifeminist, this study would not be a surprise, and would, instead, represent the needed wake-up call to women forced into feminist practices that they needed.

Looking further into this study, the authors acknowledge that the social changes spearheaded by feminism has in effect helped men in unexpected ways and put more burdens on women. For example, they acknowledge that women, most often. function outside of the home as supposed equals, while doing more than their fair share of housework at home. From this perspective, feminism has just not gone far enough, and women are functioning now in a double-bind that prevents true happiness. In this state of a social shift from the division of labor provided by gender roles years past, women must behave like their male counterparts while also maintaining their socially feminine roles.

Radical feminists like Shulasmith Firestone warned of this unintended consequence in the early 1970s when she argued for a change in the biological condition of women. In her view, women

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